It's part "Jeopardy," part spelling bee, part Whack-a-Mole and entirely challenging. It requires a knowledge of current events, a command of spelling and pronunciation, and an especially quick thumb on the buzzer.

It's WLVT-TV Channel 39's "Scholastic Scrimmage," and in one of the highest-scoring championship matches in years Thursday, Saucon Valley defeated Liberty 380 points to 285.

Metaphorically, it was like the Brooklyn Dodgers defeating the New York Yankees in the World Series. The trip to the championship match was Liberty's ninth in 23 years. The 2,200-student school had taken home gold championship medals five times. The 660-student Saucon Valley had never won the competition and made the finals just once, 19 years ago.

Saucon's team of Dan Szy, Kate Stavola, Mike Belcak and Dennis Dias wasn't just battling Liberty, it was battling history. By 7:30 a.m. Thursday, Saucon team members and coach Janice Kimenhour were huddled in a classroom grilling one another with questions from the New and Old Testaments, The Complete Works of Shakespeare and the U.S. Constitution.

"Don't look at the scoreboard," Szy, the team captain, told teammates in an 11th-hour pep talk. "Keep plugging away, because both teams are capable of going on 100-point runs."

"We were the smaller school," said Belcak, the academic team's history ace. "We were the underdogs."

It seemed that way as the match began in the curtained WLVT studio. Liberty's team of Craig Derbenwick, Patrick Girvin, Shira Simon and Michael Miles jumped to a quick lead, identifying a vulnerable point as an Achilles heel and naming Delphi as the Greek town home to the Oracle of Apollo.

But in time, Saucon Valley would run off a string of correct answers on five successive 10-point questions. By halftime of the 45-minute academic quiz contest, Saucon had answered enough 10- and 5-point questions to build a lead of 230-150.

The versatility of a team with Belcak, political whiz Szy, literature whiz Stavola and math whiz Dias proved too much for a Liberty team that had steamrolled three other teams to get to the finals.

"They were consistently good," said Liberty team captain Derbenwick, a senior headed to Northwestern to study English. "They were fast and they were consistent."

Students had 10 seconds to answer most questions, 15 for the math questions. For some, they had to furiously scribble math equations in less time than it takes to tie a shoe.

For others, they listened to classical music before identifying the composer. Some questions required students to study a monitor to identify a picture. It was not uncommon for members of both teams to sound their hand-held buzzers and answer questions by moderator Jim Davis within five seconds.

Only a handful of questions went unanswered. Neither team could identify poet Maya Angelou from a picture or description. Nor did they link Hamlet to the quote: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

Saucon Valley and Liberty, a team of seniors coached by Michael Sweigard, were the ones remaining from 30 area schools that began competing in November.